440

THE BAND OF YOUNG SPIRITS.

which he had gone through merely to satisfy himself and the world as to what description of trowsers was worn by the Saxons. His death was calm as his life. "Come out to me directly," he wrote to his friend, Sir Harry Moncrieff: “I have got something to do this week; I have got to die."

It was in 1801 that Dugald Stewart began his course of lectures on political economy. Hitherto all public favor had been on the side of the Tories, and independence of thought was a sure way to incur discouragement from the Bench, in the Church, and from every government functionary. Lectures on political economy were regarded as innovations; but they formed a forerunner of that event which had made several important changes in our literary and political hemisphere: the commencement of the "Edinburgh Review." This undertaking was the work of men who were separated from the mass of their brother-townsmen by their politics, their isolation as a class binding them the more closely together by links never broken, in a brotherhood of hope and ambition to which the natural spirits of Sydney Smith, of Cockburn, and of Jeffrey gave an irresistible charm.

Among those who the most early in life ended a career of promise was Francis Horner. He was the son of a linen-draper in Edinburgh; or, as the Scotch called it, following the French, a merchant. Horner's best linen for sheets, and tablecloths, and all the under garments of housekeeping, are still highly esteemed by the trade.

66

"My desire to know Horner," Sydney Smith states, “arose from my being cautioned against him by some excellent and feeble-minded people to whom I brought letters of introduction, and who represented him as a person of violent political opinions." Sydney Smith interpreted this to mean that Horner was a man who thought for himself; who loved truth better than he loved Dundas (Lord Melville), then the tyrant of Scotland. "It is very curious to consider," Sydney Smith wrote, in addressing Lady Holland, in 1817, "in what manner Horner gained, in so extraordinary a degree, the affections of such a number of persons of both sexes-all ages, parties, and ranks in society; for he was not remarkably good-tempered, nor particularly lively and agreeable; and an inflexible politician on the unpopular side. The causes are, his high character for probity, honor, and talents; his fine countenance; the benevolent interest he took in the concerns of all his friends; his simple and gentlemanlike manners; his untimely death." "Grave, studious, honorable, kind, every thing Horner did," says Lord Cockburn, "was marked by thoughtfulness and kindness;" a beautiful character, which was exhibited but

BROUGHAM'S EARLY TENACITY.

441

briefly to his contemporaries, but long remembered after his death.

Henry Brougham was another of the Edinburgh band of young spirits. He was educated in the High School under Luke Fraser, the tutor who trained Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey. Brougham used to be pointed out "as the fellow who had beat the master." He had dared to differ with Fraser, a hot pedant, on some piece of Latinity. Fraser, irritated, punished the rebel, and thought the matter ended. But the next day "Harry," as they called him, appeared, loaded with books, renewed the charge, and forced Luke to own that he was beaten. "It was then," says Lord Cockburn, “that I first saw him."

After remaining two years in Edinburgh, Sydney Smith went southward to marry a former schoolfellow of his sister Maria's-a Miss Pybus, to whom he had been attached and engaged at a very early period of his life. The young lady, who was of West Indian descent, had some fortune; but her husband's only stock, on which to begin housekeeping, consisted of six silver tea-spoons, worn away with use. One day he rushed into the room and threw these attenuated articles into her lap: "There, Kate, I give you all my fortune, you lucky girl!"

With the small dôt, and the thin silver spoons, the young couple set up housekeeping in the "garret end of the earth." Their first difficulty was to know how money could be obtained to begin with, for Mrs. Smith's small fortune was settled on herself by her husband's wish. Two rows of pearls had been given her by her thoughtful mother. These she converted into money, and obtained for them £500. Several years afterward, when visiting the shop at which she sold them, with Miss Vernon and Miss Fox, Mrs. Smith saw her pearls, every one of which she knew. She asked what was the price. "£1500" was the reply.

The sum, however, was all important to the thrifty couple. It distanced the nightmare of the poor and honest-debt. £750 was presented by Mr. Beach, in gratitude for the care of his son, to Smith. It was invested in the funds, and formed the nucleus of future savings-" Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte," is a trite saying. "C'est le premier pas qui gagne," might be applied to this and similar cases. A little daughter -Lady Holland, the wife of the celebrated physician, Sir Henry Holland-was sent to bless the sensible pair. Sydney had wished that she might be born with one eye, so that he might never lose her; nevertheless, though she happened to be born with two, he bore her secretly from the nursery, a few hours

after her birth, to show her in triumph to the future Edinburgh Reviewers.

The birth of the "Edinburgh Review" quickly followed that of the young lady. Jeffrey-then an almost starving barrister, living in the eighth or ninth flat of a house in Buccleuch Place-Brougham, and Sydney Smith were the triumvirate who propounded the scheme, Smith being the first mover. He proposed a motto: "Tenui Musam meditamur avena:" We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal; but this being too near the truth, they took their motto from Publius Syrus; "of whom," said Smith, "none of us had, I am sure, read a single line." To this undertaking Sydney Smith devoted his talents for more than twenty-eight years.

Meantime, during the brief remainder of his stay in Edinburgh, his circumstances improved. He had done that which most of the clergy are obliged to do—taken a pupil. He had now another, the son of Mr. Gordon, of Ellon; for each of these young men he received £400 a year. He became to them a father and a friend; he entered into all their amusements. One of them saying that he could not find conversation at the balls for his partners; "Never mind," cried Sydney Smith, "I'll fit you up in five minutes." Accordingly, he wrote down conversations for them amid bursts of laughter.

Thus happily did years, which many persons would have termed a season of adversity, pass away. The chance which brought him to Edinburgh introduced him to a state of society never likely to be seen again in Scotland. Lord Cockburn's "Memorials" afford an insight into manners, not only as regarded suppers, but on the still momentous point, of dinners. Three o'clock was the fashionable hour so late as the commencement of the present century. That hour, "not without groans and predictions," became four-and four was long and conscientiously adhered to. "Inch by inch," people yielded, and five continued to be the standard polite hour from 1806 to 1820. "Six has at length prevailed."

The most punctilious ceremony existed. When dinner was announced, a file of ladies went first in strict order of precedence. "Mrs. Colonel Such a One;""Mrs. Doctor Such a One," and so on. Toasts were de rigueur: no glass of wine was to be taken by a guest without comprehending a lady, or a covey of ladies. "I was present," says Lord Cockburn, "when the late Duke of Buccleuch took a glass of sherry by himself at the table of Charles Hope, then Lord Advocate, and this was noticed as a piece of ducal contempt." Toasts, and, when the ladies had retired, rounds of toasts, were drunk. "The prandial nuisance," Lord Cockburn wrote, 66 was horrible. But it was nothing to what followed."

THE SPECULATIVE SOCIETY.

443

At these repasts, though less at these than at boisterous suppers, a frequent visitor at the same table with Sydney Smith was the illustrious Sir James Mackintosh, a man to whose deep-thinking mind the world is every day rendering justice. The son of a brave officer, Mackintosh was born on the banks of Loch Ness: his mother, a Miss Fraser, was aunt to Mrs. Fraser Tytler, wife of Lord Woodhouselee, one of the judges of the Court of Session, and mother of the late historian of that honored name.

Mackintosh had been studying at Aberdeen, in the same classes with Robert Hall, whose conversation, he avowed, had a great influence over his mind. He arrived in Edinburgh about 1784, uncertain to what profession to belong, somewhat anxious to be a bookseller, in order to revel in "the paradise of books;" he turned his attention, however, to medicine, and became a Brunonian, that is, a disciple of John Brown, the founder of a theory which he followed out to the extent in practice. The main feature of the now defunct system, which set scientific Europe in a blaze, seems to have been a mad indulgence of the passions, and an unbridled use of intoxicating liquors. Brown fell a victim to his vices. Years after he had been laid in his grave, his daughter, Euphemia, being in great indigence, received real kindness from Sir James and Lady Mackintosh, the former of whom used to delight in telling a story of her father's saying to her, "Effy, bring me the mooderate stimulus of a hoondred draps o' laudanum in a glass o' brandy."

Mackintosh had not quitted Edinburgh when Sydney Smith reached it. Smith became a member of the famous Speculative Society. Their acquaintance was renewed years afterward in London. Who can ever forget the small, quiet dinners given by Mackintosh when living out of Parliament, and out of office, in Cadogan Place? Simple but genial were those repasts, forming a strong contrast to the Edinburgh dinners of yore. He had then long given up both the theory and practice of the Brunonians, and took nothing but light French and German wines, and these in moderation. His tall, somewhat high-shouldered, massive form; his calm brow, mild, thoughtful; his dignity of manner, his gentleness to all; his vast knowledge; his wonderful appreciation of excellence; his discrimination of faults-all combined to form one of the finest specimens ever seen even in that illustrious period, of a philosopher and historian.

Jeffrey and Cockburn were contrasts to one whom they honored. Jeffrey, "the greatest of British critics," was eight years younger than Mackintosh, having been born in 1773.

He was the son of one of the deputy clerks to the Supreme Court, not an elevated position, though one of great respectability. When Mackintosh and Sydney Smith first knew him in Edinburgh, he was enduring, with all the impatience of his sensitive nature, what he called a "slow, obscure, philosophical starvation" at the Scotch bar.

"There are moments," he wrote, "when I think I could sell myself to the ministers or to the devil, in order to get above these necessities." Like all men so situated, his depression came in fits. Short, spare, with regular, yet not aristocratic features, speaking, brilliant, yet not pleasing eyes; a voice consistent with that mignon form; a somewhat precise and anxious manner, there was never in Jeffrey that charm, that abandon, which rendered his valued friend, Henry Cockburn, the most delightful, the most beloved of men, the very idol of his native city.

The noble head of Cockburn, bald, almost in youth, with its pliant, refined features, and its fresh tint upon a cheek always clear, generally high in color, was a strong contrast to the rigid petitesse of Jeffrey's physiognomy; much more so to the large proportions of Mackintosh; or to the ponderous, plain, and, later in life, swarthy countenance of Sydney Smith. Lord Webb Seymour, the brother of the late Duke of Somerset, gentle, modest, intelligent-Thomas Thomson, the antiquary -and Charles and George Bell, the surgeon and the advocate -Murray, afterward Lord Murray, the generous pleader, who gave up to its rightful heirs an estate left him by a clientand Brougham-formed the staple of that set now long since extinct.

It was partially broken up by Sydney Smith's coming, in 1803, to London. He there took a house in Doughty Street, being partial to legal society, which was chiefly to be found in that neighborhood.

Here Sir Samuel Romilly, Mackintosh, Scarlett (Lord Abinger), the eccentric unhappy Mr. Ward, afterward Lord Dudley, "Conversation" Sharp, Rogers, and Luttrell, formed the circle in which Sydney delighted. He was still very poor, and obliged to sell the rest of his wife's jewels; but his brother Robert allowed him £100 a year, and lent him, when he subsequently removed into Yorkshire, £500.

He had now a life of struggling, but those struggles were the lot of his early friends also; Mackintosh talked of going to India as a lecturer; Smith recommended Jeffrey to do the same. Happily, both had the courage and the sense to await for better times at home; yet Smith's opinion of Mackintosh was, that "he never saw so theoretical a head which contained so much practical understanding;" and to Jeffrey he wrote: